Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

OCT-NOV 2000

Local

As public schools open their doors and begin the drill and kill test-prep instruction required to satiate the states voracious appetite for measurable outcomes, the New York City school system as a whole continues to hobble on to the next precipice of educational improvement.

Express

For fifty years my father sat in the same worn-out chair in a very lived-in apartment on the northern edge of Times Square. The place is warm, redolent of some masala of unknown spices. The iron radiators gargle and hiss.

Art

Less than a decade ago, Williamsburg was still a desolate haven for vast, raw, dirt-cheap lofts and an emerging art scene that imagined itself an ambitious underground alternative to the narcissism of Soho and Chelsea, a 90s incarnation of the self-destructive glamour of the Lower East Side portrayed in Nan Goldins Ballad of Sexual Dependence.

Film

In Education of a Felon (St. Martins Press, 2000), Edward Bunker describes growing up on the fringes of 1930s Hollywood, where his father worked as a stagehand and his mother danced in Busby Berkeley musicals. Bunker, though, soon fell adrift in the world of make-believe.

Local

Over and over again we hear the standard stump speech place blame on the opponent for anything badpoverty, school violence, the hole in the ozone, obesity; and meanwhile claim responsibility for anything goodthe creation of jobs, the bull market, the saving of sea turtles, and the bright colors of the flag.